People with unsteady hands or limited control of their fingers often encounter significant difficulties in gripping small objects with their fingers, such as picking up a pill or a paper clip with their finger tips. Similar difficulties are experienced by people who have restricted mobility of their fingers caused by symptomatic joints, such as inflammation, arthritis, or the like. For those people with limited hand/finger dexterity, a hand-held gripping device that allows the person to pick up small objects with relative ease is clearly desirable. Conventional hand-held gripping devices (such as tweezers, needle nose pliers or the like) for handling small objects are not suitable for such use due to the hand dexterity required to operate them.
Some hand-held gripping devices proposed in the past use a pair of relatively wide side members which are hinged or otherwise connected so that the two side members can be pivoted towards each other to grip an object or to scoop the object up with the edges of the side members. Such devices can be seen, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,975,043 to Miles, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,188,055 to Green. These devices are designed for handling relatively large objects, such as animal excrement or fish, and are generally unsuitable for the purpose of handling small objects. Their relative large sizes also make them difficult to operate by a person with restricted finger control or mobility. Another problem with those gripping devices with two pivotable side members is that such a device does not reliably retain a small object scooped up by the edges of the side members. Typically, the two side members of such a gripping device form two side openings when their respective edges engage each other. Thus, a small object scooped up by the edges may escape from the gripping device through the side openings during subsequent handling by the user. This problem is especially significant for people with unsteady hands.
Thus, there remains a need for a gripping device which is suitable for use by people with limited hand or finger dexterity and which will allow the person to pick up small objects. The device is desirably hand-held and operable with limited finger movements by the person using the device.